Shot of the Week: The Photon Collective (Los Angeles, USA)

Aside from our smartphones, Ian and I were both camera-less for the first time ever last weekend. (Oh no!) As a result, this shot of the week is less a pretty travel photo and more about the gear we’re using for our travel photography. To prepare for our upcoming travels to Costa Rica and Mexico City (and to have new stuff to review for our latest web project), we swapped out some of our camera gear. (Very exciting!)

This photo of Ian with his new camera is one of the first photos I took with my new camera (with some Photoshop involved). And the text is part of our new logo for The Photon Collective — designed by Ian. What do you think?

So what’s this new web project and what new gear did we choose? Read on to find out more about our new and exciting photography endeavors!

The Photon Collective

You may have noticed us mentioning it on Facebook the past couple of months, but here’s a more in-depth description of our new web project:

The Photon Collective is a new community for creative photographers, including ourselves, who share and write about their collective passion for capturing light. We’ll have tutorials and video walkthroughs, gear reviews and guides, plus tools to help develop a passion for photography. We have a great collection of articles being produced for the website’s launch next week.

If you like photography, we hope you’ll join us when the site goes live on February 10th. Sign up at photoncollective.com to be one of our first visitors!

Our New Travel Photography Gear

Ian and I bought our Sony a7S and Sony a6000 just before Burning Man last year. (Great event to take your new camera to, right?) We both thoroughly enjoyed those cameras, but it was time to try something new. Lucky for us, if you take care of your camera gear, it doesn’t lose much value when you sell it!

It’s a large sensor compact camera. I no longer have the option of changing lenses, but I decided I really don’t care. Its zoom lens is versatile and it’s more practical for travel in both size and usability. I fell in love with this thing when Ian was testing out 5 compact cameras for Milky Way photography (which it does a kick-ass job with, for a point and shoot, by the way).

Reviews of our new camera gear will be coming soon, but that’s it for this week’s scoop on what we’re up to. Very camera-oriented, I know, but next week we’re heading to Costa Rica, so there will be some very green photos coming up soon in our shots of the week.

Don’t forget to keep in touch with us on Facebook, where we share more frequent details and photos from our travels!

This post was handcrafted for you during our travels in Los Angeles.

About the Author

Diana Southern

In March 2014, Diana called it quits on her traditional American working life and set out to explore the world with her partner in crime (and love of her life) Ian Norman. They now live a sustainable life of full time travel, working for themselves and seeking adventure at the same time. Here on North to South, Diana documents their journey in achieving and maintaining this "road less traveled" way of life.